Test That System First, GM: Your Players Will Thank You

A Different Way to Learn and Then Teach New Systems to Your Players... The Solo Play Way

So, dear GM… what’s a better way to learn a system before a game session if not to run it by yourself?

Ah yes, sorry, you ended up in that corner of the community. Where we solo freaks sit moodily by the window with a cup of caramel latte and scribble imaginary games to ourselves in our cute leather journal.

Now, but consider this, friend — sometimes you spend 12 hours on a weekend locked in your office imagining potential scenarios and pitfalls and documenting all the mesmerizing places and quirky denizens in your world. All of this despite the fact that you already know 90% of this work will get scrapped as soon as your players turn 180 degrees and march off the edge of your prepared area map.

I ain’t the weirdo here.

Let’s make use of your prep work! You are already but one step from actually getting some useful insight from all this excitement and imagination running wild.

[Image credit: Ombremonde]

You Don’t Need Anything Special

I bet you are already envisioning looking up “how to play X system solo”, but what I am proposing is far from being that intensive.

You seriously do not need a single other thing to get started:

• This can take as little as 30 minutes of your time and leave you with some critical findings you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

• You can continue imagining things for your current group of players (or your most chaotic specimen among it), or you can roll up a single character of any kind as a faceless stand-in.

• No need for some solo system or engine to run things for testing; I will give you some simple and effective examples.

Like, if you rolled up a character, spread out a map and oriented player tokens on it, opened stats for a big monster and rained some 5d10s to laugh at some ridiculous spell damage, you have already tried this!

I will just give you a bit more of a framework to make use of pretty much the same thing.

How to Simulate Some Scenarios

Yep, that’s all that is. You are skipping around in your imagined adventure/campaign, imagining some wacky, dramatic, or interesting scenarios and simulating a resolution in your system of choice.

• If your curiosity spans wide, you can hop around a multi-session campaign and pull mini-boss fights and critical turning points.

• If you are in a “prep one session only” school of thought, you can skip around a single adventure (and since that’s what I do, the examples below will mimic this approach).

Only one thing: just like with any prep you would do usually, never get attached to a particular event. Your players will never do these things the way you would, and they would never even do these things the way they would, if given a chance to replay a scenario. You know what I am saying. Just a gentle reminder.

Sample Scenarios for Testing

Now, set aside 30 minutes, pull out your core rulebook, and pick 1-2:

• A strong introduction scene to the adventure/campaign

  • Perhaps the mountain town they arrived to for overnight rest is half-buried in a recent avalanche, and just about everyone from the proud sheriff to the grieving baker has a guess as to how that happened

• A heated or tricky argument with an NPC that has stakes

  • The local mayor doesn’t trust people who look like they are after the silver in the mines, and without his help the party will be avoided by most of the locals and will likely have to spend the night on the outskirts roamed by the wildlife

• A combat scene in an area full of environmental elements

  • Perhaps an encounter with some vagabonds inside a mining cave with an underground stream and a waterfall, sharp-edged stalactites, some moving rubble, and a barrel of explosives meant for extracting silver

• A tricky environmental, magical, or mechanical puzzle/challenge

  • Perhaps the spiral staircase leading deep into the mine has mostly collapsed. The hazard is exacerbated by trickling water and brittle scaffolding. However, some of the torches are still dry, and the debris includes long planks from the wooden ceiling and broken-off pulley chains above

• A confusing/mysterious room hiding a vital clue

  • The bottom of the staircase is riddled with clusters of minerals giving off static electricity, sending off purple sparks into the air and too dangerous to handle, but the broken-off part of a potentially magical tool gives a hint as to how they were extracted

Start off easy: if you know the general direction, just pursue that. Roll some dice and actually attempt to resolve the challenge as your chosen player character(s) for this.

If your hand stretches towards the map roll, sure! Set up some minis, get the initiative tracker out. Only bit of advice: unless you are a true mathhead, run this one with only a couple players and a couple enemies at most. It gets crunchy, I warned you.

And, for a true creative challenge, roll up the elements you are dealing with. In this case, yeah, go ahead and look up some random tables: a location, a character, a hazard… if you want a simple all-in-one, grab a One Page Solo Engine or a free version of a Plot Unfolding Machine. And you don’t even need those: roll up a couple of random nouns & adjectives and really let your imagination really fly!

Where are your players? What are they looking at? How big is that thing? What is the primary obstacle? Now try to piece that together and have fun realizing that, yes — you wouldn’t be all that surprised if this actually happened at the table.

Using Your Findings

If you started testing stuff even before you got to this section, you probably don’t need me to tell you what findings you could stumble upon. It just comes right at you (“crap, I need chase rules? For this adventure?”). But, I will leave you with some ideas!

1. For Your Own Understanding

• This approach can save you time reading a rulebook cover-to-cover in the future. Play through a single scenario in one evening (even if you skip around slower segments), and you should have a strong grasp of all the core and most of the extended mechanics.

• Most importantly, running test scenarios will help you understand how you apply the system’s rules. No GM runs a system in the same way, even if given the same exact adventure scenario. Think of it as you would about a writer’s voice, just your own default practices, preferences, and tricks.

• You will get a better sense of the setting’s vibe for a pre-written scenario by spending some time with it, or develop your own setting further by picking different areas to visit and explore.

• In the same vein, you can end up with a mental bank (or a physical list) of NPCs that are naturally compelling due to the degree of descriptive detail that made you note them down in the first place. Same goes for cool objects and evocative environment elements.

2. To Teach the System to Your Players

Remember how I mentioned expediting you learning the core mechanics? You will now explain them better, too.

In my player group, we test out so many systems and run so many one-shots, our GMs have become masters at crash-course overviews and looking at the rulebook prior to the game night has become optional.

Trust me, it doesn’t take away from the experience whatsoever, just takes away that little bit of pressure and guilt.

Typically, you only need to tell your players enough for them to roll up their characters and understand their general options for interacting with the world once you are done reading off the introduction to the adventure.

(E.g., whether they can primarily expect to use abilities/skills, any resource cost or cost of die failure, and how they can swing the odds in their favor. If you are throwing them right into battle, probably combat overview, too.)

Your scenario testing exercise should have identified all the key rules that will come up before anything else does (even if the rulebook lumps it all in one section), and any of the bits you personally found confusing.

Otherwise, you can dive right in.

The start is always a bit awkward as the players get comfortable inside their new bodies, but about 10-20 minutes in everyone should be more or less on the same page.

Unless you picked a truly mechanics-heavy game, the key is to encourage your players to articulate fiction (What are they trying to do? What is the intended result?) and for you to help incorporate the crunchy bits as needed.

You tested them last weekend! You should have a solid idea.

(If you don’t, take our game group’s wisdom and just come up with something that makes sense on the spot. Keep it rolling and have fun, the details don’t matter.)

3. To Prime Your Players

Oh, and speaking of them rolling up the characters!

Even if you hush this kind of speculation with a finger to your lips and your best dramatic evil laugh, the players inevitably try to create characters they predict will be narratively or mechanically compelling in the upcoming adventure.

At the very least, they might try to keep checking in with the current player party during the process, taking stock of the current “experts” and sussing out the blind spots. (Alternatively, of course, their approach might be to elicit reactions of sheer horror from you and/or fellow players, but that in of itself is an attempt at prediction, right?)

You don’t need to give anything away, but after some testing you probably have an idea of what kind of approaches generally tend to be favored by your chosen system.

You might have a grasp of the gameplay loop that’s the most satisfying (e.g., rolling explosive dice on crits by making use of skills), or just the elements that were given more thought than others (a survival system for wilderness explorations or a social network for an urban/courtly adventure).

You can pretty much state so explicitly, even if you do keep emphasizing that the players can do whatever they would like. You will have a more satisfying adventure or a start to the campaign if the players quickly find some rewarding combinations and satisfying synergies for their character builds.

Obviously, all of this applies to the setting and the narrative as well. If you are a GM who guards these secrets closely, I will leave you with yet another little shocker from our gaming group: sometimes our current GM will share the intended direction of the story with the players during character creation. Gasp! Then we all make it happen together, how bizarre is that? (It’s as if tabletop roleplay isn’t a collaborative experience 😉).

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So, what, did I encourage some caramel latte vibes here or not?

I prefer tea when I run my cute animal apothecary adventure, by the way. My most recent game is a 3-monitor setup with a physical dice & minis and a voice-to-text, and there will be far more of all this solo madness in the weeks to come.

I will draft up an extended version of this already thoroughly incoherent babble of an article, but for a taste of what’s to come you can take a peek at one of the solo resource articles on my website.

For now, go give Sophie some love for encouraging some activity in our corner of the community and motivating me to write this! (See the note below).

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This piece was written in response to The Roleplay Experience asking “to share their thoughts on learning new systems… or how to teach players a new system as the GM”. Well, sue me, I think solo play can help with both.